How To Do Website Audit for SEO?

If you ever wonder why your competitor ranked high on search engines but not you? Well, it’s time to perform a website audit for SEO to review your site to identify errors so you can do a lot better to rank your website as well.

So here in this article, you will have everything you need to know, what is a website Seo audit? Why is it so important and how do you perform a website audit for SEO?

Let me clear this, Auditing a website is not about improving your Seo health. But it also includes your site’s technical performance, Website development, site content, user experience, and much more.

Now so understand this, there are so many tools on the web that promised to do a complete audit for your website. Some of these tools give you a free SEO audit and some are premium Website check tools.

I’m not completely denying that these tools are not helpful but you need to understand the importance of a manual inspection of your site.

You can check your site speed manually, more important check your sitemap indexing, you can manually check your webpage’s indexing status by typing this on the search engine’s search box: “site:yourwebsite.com/xyz” to see if your page appears in SERP or not. There is more to talk about so let’s start with what I mean by Seo audit of a website.

What is SEO Audit of a Website?

The SEO Audit is the process of reviewing your website and identifying the errors and problems that are resisting your website to perform better on the search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Your website will not be able to get a higher rank and traffic if it contains errors. But don’t worry you can fix this problem with the help of doing SEO Audit.

You can identify various factors with SEO Audit like:

• Checks On-page SEO problems of your website
• Identifies if your site is correctly crawled, rendered, and indexed by search engines or not
• It helps to do optimization of keywords of pages and posts on the website
• Checks whether your website provides a good experience to mobile and desktop users or not
• Identifies all the factors that need to improve
• Checks the backlinks from other sites working properly
• Maintains your website report to improve performance

Why is SEO audit necessary for a Website?

SEO Audits are an important process for a website. It helps to grow your website and your business. If you do this, then you will avoid these circumstances:

• You can check if you got a penalty from Google for providing toxic backlinks on your website.
• This audit checks for something which is decreasing your sales
• Your website is perfectly crawling and indexed by search engines to represent your website in the search results
• You can check what factors are responsible to decrease your organic traffic

If you get details about all the problems and consequences of your website, then you work and improve them and increase your website’s health on search engine rankings.

Tools to do SEO Audit of a Website

• Google Search Console. Google Search Console helps to check if your website is indexed properly. You can use this tool in many ways like for keywords, fixing the errors, Core Web Vitals, CTR, etc. You can resubmit a page of your website for SEO Audit after reoptimizing.
• Google Analytics. Google Analytics helps to get data and metrics of the performance of your website on the search engine. You can use this tool to measure the impact and improve the traffic of your website.
• Google PageSpeed Insights. Google PageSpeed Insights helps to check the performance of your page on desktops and mobiles. This checks the loading speed, image opening, and full details of a website page. If the pages of your website are not working properly on mobiles and desktops, then you can use this tool.
• SEO Software. There are many SEO Softwares available to do an SEO Audit for a website. Softwares like SEMRush, Moz, and Ahrefs offer the site crawling tool and site auditing tools to audit your website to check the website’s health, errors, and problems that are resisting your website to get a ranking on search engines and get lots of traffic from worldwide visitors.

How to do SEO Audit for a Website?

To find errors, and deficiencies of your website and to improve them and get higher rank and lots of traffic. You have to do an SEO Audit of your website.

You can do SEO Audit by following these steps

1. Analysis of your Site.

• First, you need the best Seo tools for your website.
• Go into your Site Audit Tool and Click on ‘Set up’ or ‘Add New Project’ to start the new project
• Now select settings and check the options ‘Limit of Checked Pages’ and ‘Crawl source’
• You need to change settings, After that go to ‘Start Site Audit’
• Now you will get a dashboard having audit data.

2. Understand your Competitor and Analyse your Rankings

Understand your Competitor

You need to apply an Organic Research tool on your website to get an idea about competitors’ performance.

Just copy your domain and enter it into this tool and select ‘Competitors’. It will give you a report in the form of a Competitor Positioning Map from the top 100 competitors. Now you can see which competitor is above you and which is below you.

Analyze your Rankings

First, you need to set up a ‘Position Tracking Tool’ on your website.

Go to the ‘Position Tracking Tool’ and make a new project. Make your campaign by selecting a search engine, location and device.

Now add keywords to track data. You can add keywords with the help of tools like Google Analytics and SEMRush. Now start tracking, and you can see the ranking of your keywords.

3. Identify Duplicate versions of your site

Google indexes only one version of your site. To check and set domains you need to run this check on your site.

Your site should be available as:

• https://xyz.com
• https://www.xyz.com
• http://xyz.com
• http://www.xyz.com

Search engines see these versions as different versions of your site. But it is a single version for the users. You can check all the versions of your site’s URL easily.

You have to set up all these versions as a single version on your website.

4. Check the Indexed URLs of your Site

You can run this check at the same time. You will find many pages indexed by Google when you run a site search.

If you see the number of pages indexed more than expected, then there is duplicate content that needs to be addressed. You can block or re-index duplicate pages with the help of the Google Search Console Removal Tool.

As well as if you see the number of pages indexed less than expected, then it means your site is not crawled or indexed properly.

5. Manual Action Checking

You can get a manual action from Google if your website does not follow Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

It will drop your website’s rankings and you will not be able to rank higher again until Google revokes manual action.

You can see this Google Manual Action in the Search Console. Go to the ‘Security and Manual Actions’ section. If you see a green tick then it means, you didn’t receive manual action. On the other hand, if you see a red tick, then you have a manual action received for your site.

6. Check the Speed of your Site

When a page of your website loads slower, then it leads to an increase in bounce rate. It is important to your site that the page should load faster for SEO and UX purposes.

Go to the dashboard of your site audit tool and see the performance by selecting ‘Site Performance Report’.

You should go to Google PageSpeed Insights to get the results about loading speed and various areas which need some improvement.

7. Analyse your site’s Mobile Experience

If you own a website that runs better on a desktop but not good on the mobiles. Then it is also a deficiency for your website’s growth. Nowadays, mobile usage is higher than any other device. That’s why you have to make your website mobile-friendly and provide a better mobile user experience.

Mobile friendly is also a ranking factor. But those which are optimized for mobile experience also contain some issues.

Google offers to check the performance of mobile versions of websites with the help of a tool called Mobile-Friendly Test. You can check the other issues from the Mobile Usability section.

Your site can have mobile-friendliness issues like AMPs. These pages can help you to decrease the loading time of a site. You can check AMPs from the crawled pages report and statistics report of a site.

8. On-Page SEO Auditing

This is very important to do SEO of your content for the website’s higher rank and traffic. You can do SEO with the help of plugins like Yoast SEO, SEO checker, etc.

There are these things you can do with SEO Tools:

• You can create optimized content
• These tools help to optimize meta descriptions, title tags, and header tags
• You can put internal links
• You can add useful image alt tags
• This helps to increase the readability of your content

After you do SEO on your site, you have to do an On-Page SEO Audit with the help of ‘On-Page SEO Checker. It will show you the pages to optimize and give a list of ideas.

9. Fix Broken Links

If your web pages have broken links and the user clicks on them to get the desired page and if he is getting a 404 error page, then it harms your website. Search engines like Google also see spam or negative links and it can affect your search engine ranking also.

But you can fix these links by doing a Site Audit. You will get broken internal links highlighted in the Site Audit report.

You can simply remove the URL or update the URL to fix this and can find the pages which have the most ‘Internal LinkRank’ from the Internal Linking Report.

10. Fix Duplicate Content Issues

If your website has duplicate content then it will be difficult to get a higher ranking of your site on search engines. This content creates confusing signals for search engines.

You can check duplicate content issues from the Site Audit report. You have to ensure that your content is unique and original to check the duplicate content. The Originality Check feature allows users to check if the content is original or copied.

11. Compare Content to Higher Ranking Pages

You have to spend time analyzing the high-rank pages for search terms. If you see a slight difference between high-rank pages and your content, then you need to edit your work with the help of a ‘content auditor’ keeping in mind ‘what is the intent of the searcher?’.

You have to identify the intent of a specific keyword. The ‘Keyword Research Tools’ now provide Search Intent Metric to determine the intent of a keyword easily.

Conclusion

This article shows you the SEO Audit of a Website. SEO Audit is a very compulsory process for the health of a website. It helps the website to get the top rank and lots of traffic on search engines.

It is the process of reviewing your website and identifying the errors and problems that are resisting your website to perform better on the search engines like Google and Yahoo.

If you own a website, you should do an SEO Audit of your website.

We hope you enjoyed this article and got the proper information, share this article for those who need this information.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is SEO Audit?

As I mentioned earlier, SEO Audit is the process of reviewing your website and identifying the errors and problems that are resisting your website to perform better on the search engines like Google and Yahoo. Your website will not be able to get a higher rank and traffic if it contains errors.

What are the benefits of doing a Website audit?

Here are some benefits of SEO Audit:

• You can check if you got a penalty from Google for providing toxic backlinks on your website.
• This audit checks for something which is decreasing your sales.
• Your website is perfectly crawled and indexed by search engines to represent your website in the search results.

What are the major key elements to auditing a website?

There are some steps to doing an SEO Audit:

• Understand your Competitor and Analyse your Rankings
• Identify Duplicate versions of your site
• Check Indexed URLs of your Site
• Manual Action Checking